In the following essay, Sanders relates King's story “The Monkey” to the film Forbidden Planet, in its psychic personification of the human id or subconscious.

Considering how much more effective Stephen King's horrific images are on the page than on the screen, it probably is just as well that no movie has been made of “The Monkey,” in which a scruffy child's toy seems to be the source of all supernatural menace. What could be frightening about a broken clockwork monkey that can't even bang its little cymbals together when someone turns its wind-up key? Yet King somehow does involve readers in a distraught father's memories of a series of violent deaths during his youth that seem to portend the destruction of his present family. The toy monkey is featured on the...